storage

Where do you store your data, and how do you get it there? This problem has been approached with many solutions. Personally I use a combination of local USB hard drives, Dropbox, and a thumbdrive. It’s not the worst situation, but the local hard drives are always a point of frustration. If I have my laptop away from the house and I need someone that’s stored on those drives I’m out of luck.

Pogoplug is a $130 product that has potential to bridge the gap between data storage and mobility. It connects your external hard drives to your network, for NAS goodness. Where it takes the extra step, though, is in how it connects this storage space to the web. You can connect to this storage from any outside connection thanks to a service from Pogoplug that handles all of the dynamicDNS type issues for you. If you buy the Pogoplug unit the service is free for the lifetime of the product.

I haven’t had a ton of time to look into the details of the product, but at first glance it looks like it would be a great link between my laptop and my bank of USB hard drives I keep in my office at home. It should be shipping in mid-December, but all of the images I can find on the website so far are Hypershot renders.

I’m a HUGE fan of Dropbox, the file syncing/sharing/versioning service that does an amazing job while completely getting out of the way. One annoyance, though, is that in order for Dropbox to put status icons on top of file thumbnails, the thumbnail previews in OS X were disabled. This made it frustrating to work on files stored inside of a Dropbox synced folder. A while ago, I wrote about some manual tweaks I had found that could get your icon previews back.

This change makes it so much easier to work within my Dropbox synced folders, and I can’t express how happy I am that the Dropbox team pulled it off. If you haven’t checked out their service before, please head to their website and watch their video ASAP.